W.G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz concerns, among many things, what happens to a person when memory is suppressed. In Sebald’s novel, Jacques Austerlitz suppresses his childhood memories, the only ones he has of his mother, father, nanny, and the surroundings in his city of Prague.

Put on a kindertransport at the age of 4 in 1939 to escape Nazi deportation, little Jacques becomes Dafydd Elias, the son of a Welsh couple. It isn’t until he is a grown man, visiting an antiquarian bookstore in London and overhearing a radio show on which two women are sharing their experiences as children on kindertransports, that his suppressed memories begin to bubble up, painfully popping and disturbing him.

As he travels to Prague and to the former concentration camp outside of Prague, Theresienstadt, he forces himself to bring to Ego the deep sadness that Unconscious has been harboring for him. Like an enormous cosmic pressure valve, the Unconscious will surrender its holdings when the Ego becomes unhappy.

Jung observes that the self is the Ego. But, he says, we have another part that is connected to a power far greater than ourselves. Some call this power God.

Jung says that we have a soul but that just the use of the word soul begins to work against its true meaning. He says that the soul is the Self (with a capital S). He observes that the Self is not a noun but rather a verb.

He says, The Self Selves.

What this means is that our soul force, the Self, will not be denied its true mission in our brief but important earthly possibilities. Should we deny the Self, it will make itself known, in some way.

The obvious answer is that your suppressed memories disguisedly emerge in your nightly dreams in the form of nightmares.

But, what about “forgotten” memories as opposed to “suppressed” memories? We, all of us I feel sure, have had, as adults, dreams in which we seem to be looking up at everyone, even though we’re not prone in the dream. Obviously these are forgotten memories of very early childhood.

Think also of the times you’ve smelled a certain smell, and immediately you’re transported back to when you were a child and you had smelled that smell for the first time.

Perhaps this dynamic was at play when Jacques Austerlitz overheard the radio show in the bookshop?

Very interesting distinction, Christopher.
I think you are right; that is, your discerning the difference between forgotten memories and suppressed ones reminds us all about childhood “happy” memories that are brought to the fore by sensory experience.

My Self, as far as I understood from your writing, seems not to be talking to me, but, for some strange reasons, I feel that I am following Him, in all the things I do. Whatever I choose to read in bed, before going to sleep, it is because I follow Him; the woman I chose for my life, it is because of Him; the things I write in my blog, it is because of Him again (which shows He is very patient with me). And so forth.
Your post makes me want to read some Jung.

Since Jung, the mystic, said that the majority of his neurotics were those who had lost their faith, I imagine we might regard his not-quite religious ideas as therapies.

Freud, the atheist, when treating his neurotics, would, I imagine, have had quite a different angle on those very ideas, which he initiated, and for which he coined such terms as idrepression, conscious, unconscious and ego.

Should I then approach your question as an aspiring believer or an aspiring non-believer or simply as a neurotic?

The question should be approached from who you are. Only you know that, but I have my guesses.
Jung was a believer which is why I pay such attention to his words. They make a lot of sense.
As I have written about before, by the time we are in late mid-life, we instinctively know if we are moving with our Self or against it.